The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

Honourable Mentions: Beetlejuice, Midnight Run, Who Framed Roger Rabbit

It's an unfortunate reality that the vast majority of the action films of the 1980s are characterised as excessive cheesefests, antiquated by the egos of their leads and the wanton destruction of their gunfights, because - as many genre proponents will confirm - there is both craft and nuance in them there hills.

If any filmmaker were to exemplify that sense of underestimation, it'd have to be John McTiernan, who proved himself a master of genre subversion during an eight-year period from the late eighties through to the mid-nineties. His 1987 classic, Predator - which is also in contention to be the greatest action film of all time - took contemporary genre icons like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers and placed them within the confines of a sci-fi slasher, while 1990's The Hunt for Red October - based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name - spotlighted the bookish but determined CIA analyst Jack Ryan as he butts heads with all manner of stringent military archetypes. (He also co-developed 1993's ill-fated but supremely underrated genre tribute/parody Last Action Hero.)

But the action film most commonly regarded to have recalibrated the genre's trajectory is Die Hard, McTiernan's 1988 blockbuster famed for its wisecracking protagonist who gets his ass kicked as much as he delivers the ass-kicking.

Die Hard was famously laughed out of cinemas when its trailer first played, with audiences perplexed that the star of Moonlighting was now duking it out with machine-gun-wielding criminals in a high-rise office building, but that's merely a testament to the transgressive abilities of McTiernan as a filmmaker. He ushered in a whole new era of action cinema, took Bruce Willis from TV to the big screen, and delivered a then-unmatched level of genre spectacle - and it's arguably not even his best film.

(Just don't get bogged down in the Christmas movie debate, for all our sakes.)